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Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Looking Back at Grade 10 French

Oh such a year of disappointment for French! At first I was doing very well in it, but then suddenly I started receiving bad marks for assignments and projects that I thought had good quality. I was fine with this, though, because perhaps it was just that I got complacent and in the process lowered my standard for "good quality."

The real disappointment came with the summary unit. My French teacher had very strange (and to me, unreasonable) expectations for our summaries that I simply couldn't accept. For example, she wanted us to paraphrase the original texts to an extent where "my neighbors" would become "the people that live beside me." This was intolerable. Not only was this unreasonable, it also made making summaries a much harder and more time-consuming task. As a result, I only got a 72% on the reading exam! I really didn't think that I deserved this mark, because I was positive that I didn't do this bad. Anyway, because of this horrible, horrible mark, my French mark dropped below 90% and I knew that with only the writing exam left, it'd be impossible for my mark to rise up again. That was probably my saddest moment during the first semester.

Perhaps it was hugely because of the frustration that I had in French, I have decided not to take the course next year. My time table was already filled out with other courses, and the discontent about the subject simply stopped me from trying to make space on the time table for it. So unfortunately I probably won't be improving my French skills in the future, and will probably forget all the grammar rules that I have learned this year. In fact, I don't think I would be able to remember anything that I have learned from this class a few years later. How sad (I am not saying this sarcastically).